- There's no denying the MacBook Air 2020
is a pretty sleek little machine.
Except for one small flaw, instead of doing
what every other laptop manufacturer ever does
and put a fan right next to the CPU
where the majority of the heat is generated,
Apple opted to put the fan over yonder somewhere,
leaving the CPU with only about
10 watts of cooling capacity to work with.
How much performance did they leave on the table?
To find out the answer to that
we have collected this bin of cooling apparatus
with everything from upside-down air things
to water cooling pumps to this tray,
which you guys might recognize from our video
from several years back,
water cooling the original MacBook 2015
by actually submerging it in water.
Yes, my friends today is gonna be a lot of fun.
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(upbeat music)
To tell if our wacky cooling solutions are doing anything
we will first need to establish a performance baseline.
Running our MacBook Air,
which is a quad-core eight thread CPU
with no aides whatsoever.
I'm just gonna fire up Intel Power Gadget here
and you can also see
we've got a quad core 8 thread MacBook Pro 13-inch
running right next to it.
Now, it does run a different CPU
but it should give us some idea of
what we might strive for with a properly cooled chip.
Looking at the power draw these CPUs,
our MacBook Pro starts by shooting up to about 40, 45 watts
and then dips down closer to 30, 35
and finishes out the test there.
So there's no way that a 25 watt peak CPU
is going to be able to match that in terms of performance.
But you can see that over time
we fall down as low as 10 watts.
So I think we should be able to close the gap
a fair bit here.
100 degrees, that seems perfectly reasonable.
Actually, they both run at 100 degrees
just this one doesn't have a fan attached to it.
1,016 points, darn it, about half the speed.
Let's try and close that gap.
Cooling method number one, a stand.
- [Brandon] Well, and a fan.
- Oh, and we're gonna add a fan to it.
put that there.
- [Brandon] Yeah that's why the rubber chummy's are on it.
- That's pretty cheesy.
So between 40 and 45, we'll consider that baseline
before we start each test?
- Yeah, sounds good. - Is that reasonable, okay.
So here we go 1,016 that's the score to beat.
Conspiracy theory time, tell me I'm wrong here.
Apple has been sandbagging the performance
of their Intel based MacBooks for years now
so that when they announce the ARM based MacBooks
they can be like, bam, it runs it like half the temperature!
No, no applause, nothing, all right.
It is amazing how quickly this thing shoots up
to 100 degrees isn't it?
- [Brandon] It's pretty much instant.
- How can it not love itself if itself is so hot?
Ey, got 'em, lttstore.com.
Okay, you told me this was gonna work,
I don't think this is working.
We're down to like 11.6 watts already.
So tell me, Brandon, where do you think the CPU is?
- [Brandon] I don't know, Linus, in the middle of the PC?
- Could it be here? - No.
- Or here? - No.
- [Linus] 1,034, all right,
well so much for this idea working.
- [Brandon] Hey, that's a 2% increase.
- 2%, all right, we're gonna have to get more extreme.
what's test number two?
- Fan with no bottom, so this is kind of the test where like
if they just put a fan in there
this is how good it would perform.
- All right.
With the unit open we've got a great look
at what we were talking about before
so here's the CPU right under this
tiny little sort of a heatsink,
so it's got some little folded metal fins over it,
it's a heatsink.
And then here's the fan,
that they went and they they put it in the laptop,
so like it has a fan.
They just didn't bother to have the fan
draw air over the heatsink
to cool the CPU before exhausting it.
I don't think anyone has yet
offered up a clear and believable explanation
for why they would have done this.
They went and they put the heatsink and the fan in there,
they just didn't bring them together, you know.
Run number three, definitely going slower,
it's making its way to a hundred degrees slower.
Now we're having a look at the heart of the system here,
that is almost 10 degrees lower.
Maybe not 10 but more than five for sure.
Dang, MacBook, you fly.
Our package power consumption is higher than last time
which means I'm expecting better performance
but our utilization is only about 87%.
And of course we did hit 100 degrees here
so it looks like, it looks like,
anyway, that we are thermally limited right now.
Why is it asking for 3.4 gigahertz,
it's got a know it's not going to get that.
There it is, 1,088.
Woo, what's what, like another 4%?
But we can do better.
So far we've got about an 8% uplift in performance
over our stock configuration.
But that's without changing out our thermal compound.
So that's gonna be the next leg of our journey.
We're gonna go with Noctua NT-H2 thermal compound.
See, I'm pushing that down flat.
It seems like it's not actually designed
to sit right against the die.
- [Brandon] That makes no sense.
- I mean, it makes sense if you want the thermal performance
to not be as good as it could be.
- [Brandon] Do you want to put it back on
and like give it a wiggle?
- [Linus] It's not gonna do anything
'cause it doesn't go down far enough.
See?
So I can wiggle it all I want
but it can't go down any farther.
See?
Oh, shoot.
- [Brandon] Are we taking a trip to the milling machine?
- I think we have to.
- [Brandon] That's fun.
- I knew you'd like that.
Recess those a little bit.
- Please don't ruin it. - That's the plan.
- [Linus] Stressed out, Alex.
- [Alex] You and me both.
- [Linus] They don't exactly sell this replacement part
on apple.com.
- [Alex] Have you tried getting the Apple card?
Maybe they have it then.
Now it's touching.
We're going to take this nut right here
that controls the depth.
It's nice and snug there, gonna back it off just that much.
- I'm uncomfortable.
- [Brandon] Yeah, I was not thinking
we'd be doing this here today.
Well I guess-- (mechanical whirring)
- [Linus] I can't look.
But I can't look away.
Okay, that's lots, that's enough.
- [Alex] Aw, I think that's more than we needed.
- I hate this. - Why did I buy you this?
- You know what sucks though, Alex,
is well we might be getting better contact
we now have what I would consider to be
a significant amount less copper on the heatsink.
Like we didn't remove much, but compared to what's there.
- [Brandon] The worst part is
this was supposed to be the reasonable do at a home option.
- We had no way of knowing
that they were gonna have such a boneheaded,
I mean, I don't want to call it a flaw
'cause it's clearly intentional, but design decision?
We use thermal pads
because they allow for greater tolerances
in things like surface mount components like a memory chip.
To do it with a die like this
where the manufacturing tolerances are so tight,
there's no reason for it.
That I'm aware of, other than just
not wanting it to perform well, I don't get it.
- [Brandon] Well I'd say it's just cheaper for them to make.
- All they had to do was put a spring
on each one of those screws and do a spring mount
like everyone else ever.
Got a little wiggle wobble, let's have a look here.
Oh yeah, that is way better.
Now we just need to be careful
not to accidentally over tighten these,
'cause that is a definite possibility.
- [Brandon] If it's not immediately at 100 degrees
then it's way better.
- [Linus] We're still at 17 watts package power.
- Huh? - And only 90 degrees.
- [Brandon] Really?
Okay, so that actually is worse than before with the fan
but the temps were definitely better
so I feel like it might just be the turbo profile?
- [Linus] But that's better than our first run, isn't it?
- [Brandon] Yeah, that's 3% better.
- Even if I'm not sure exactly what to make of that
the show must go on so let's move on to our next idea
which is expanding the amount of cooling surface area
that the machine has by putting a thermal pad
in between this heatsink here and the chassis.
It actually seems like Apple's using a thermal insulator
in order to keep the bottom of the computer cooler,
so I guess we're gonna have to pull that off first.
- [Brandon] Yep, that goes rip.
- To be clear, the inclusion of this insulator here
is something that I actually oppose.
The difference between
something being comfortable against your skin
and being literally burned by it
is actually a surprisingly small amount.
- [Brandon] Yeah, like 43 degrees is what you shower at
and 46.7 will burn you in 35 minutes.
50 degrees will burn you in one minute.
- Okay, how many layers thick should we go here, boys?
Sure, why not, if we're gonna wing it
we might as well wing it hard.
These kinds of pads
are hardly the most thermally conductive material
but they're obviously better than an insulator
if we're trying to cool the CPU at the cost of the user.
- [Brandon] So if the bottom of the chassis
gets above 46 degrees then we're bad,
if it stays below that then we're all good.
- [Linus] Ooh, 40 degrees.
Now that's a hot bottom!
- [Brandon] No, that's actually fine.
- [Linus] Well, it's also not done yet.
- [Brandon] Yeah, but 40 degrees is totally comfortable.
- [Linus] Well, let's see how comfortable.
- [Brandon] 43 degrees is like a bit uncomfortable,
46 is you get burned. - That's not to bad yet.
We are still under 75 degrees. - What the hell?
- Well, you got so little heatsink area
and then you go and spread all that heat out over
this giant piece of aluminum,
yeah, it makes sense it would do a little better.
- [Brandon] It did so much better
when you just had the heatsink mounted properly
and it probably has a tiny bit more mounting pressure now.
- [Linus] 43.9.
- It's getting hot. - It's getting hot,
it's a hot bottom!
Results coming in, Alex, you ready?
1,155, we never cracked 80 degrees.
- [Brandon] That's a 14% improvement above stock.
- That is freaking nuts, hold on,
I'm gonna start it running again
just so that it doesn't really get a chance
to cool down too much,
I want to see what our hot bottom temperatures ended up at.
46.
- [Brandon] Yeah, you're in getting burned territory now.
- Yep, that's too hot, that's not comfortable.
- [Brandon] Now like lots of gaming laptops
will be hotter than that on the bottom.
- Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be like that,
they could have put a fan on it.
That was an option.
So much performance left on the table though.
It's clear that to reach our next performance tier
we need to do something
about the cooling of the chassis itself.
That is where this comes in.
Yes, my friends, I would like to do a recreation
of of our 2015 experiment, immersing the laptop in water.
- [Brandon] I don't think we should do that at all.
- Well, what's your brilliant idea?
- [Brandon] We water cool it.
So I got this little thing right here off of Amazon,
it was $17. - Amazon, lies.
You've been shopping on AliExpress again.
- [Brandon] it was $17 and it says laptop water cooling.
That's it, no documentation,
this is all that came in the box.
I think it can do the job
way better than that cookie sheet right there.
I'm gonna go get water for this.
- Look, it's not like the thing died last time.
- [Brandon] Yeah, but like you can fall off your motorcycle
on the highway and not die,
that doesn't mean you want to do it again.
- That is a false equivalency, it wasn't even damaged.
- [Brandon] You could just you know slide along the road
and be like, oh, it's fine.
Next time I definitely won't turn into jam.
- [Linus] So there's that.
Really? - Yeah.
- Huh, you know what, I think you might be right,
this might actually perform better
than putting it in non frozen water.
But we could also put it directly in frozen water.
- And maybe kill it. - Big brain time.
That's what the kids say, right, big brain?
- [Brandon] Let's just, you know, have some safety here.
- Safety, I see.
You didn't even catch my pun.
Safety, I see.
Oh, that's chilly boys!
- [Brandon] Is it zero degrees, give or take?
- [Linus] It's hard to tell
because of like emissivity issues or whatever.
- [Brandon] Are you able to see
a cold spot on the MacBook now?
- [Linus] It's chilly.
Nope, it's still hot.
I mean, I'm sure the bottom is a bit of a different,
ooh yeah, the bottom is a different story.
- [Brandon] What's the CPU temperature right now?
1,716, we're sub ambient.
- [Linus] Here we go, boys.
- [Brandon] What's it at?
- [Linus] It still hit 70 degrees but 16,
oh, well, it also spiked to 35 watts.
- [Brandon] Damn, that's way faster than before.
- Temps are 51 and our package power is over 16 watts still.
It really is a shame
how aggressively this thing gets power-limited.
'Cause even though we're at 41 and a half degrees right now
it's still all the way down to about 13 watts package power.
I'm disappointed.
I thought keeping the thermals under control
would net us significantly better performance,
this is just power limited.
- [Brandon] Yeah.
- Did our pump just stop? - Nope.
- It ain't flowin' fast though.
I was really hoping it would stay up
in the like 15 to 18 Watts neighborhood
and we were gonna see like a really big performance jump.
- Yeah, 'cause its up what, like 40 degrees now?
Definitely not thermally limited.
- Oh yeah, like the top of this thing is 24 degrees.
It's cool to the touch.
So you can see this look,
Alex's hand is actually warmer
than the surface of the laptop.
Hey, do you have less blood flow in your pinky?
I mean, we learned a lot of things today,
just I didn't expect this.
- I think that none of the things
that we learned today we expected.
- The score is 1,155.
So there was no real benefit from going
from just putting a thermal pad on the CPU
that helps the bottom of the chassis dissipate heat
to putting an ice-cold water block on the bottom of it,
that's disappointing.
We didn't get the result that we expected or wanted
but we still learned a lot today.
One, is that the MacBook Air is gonna be
in a completely different performance class
from the MacBook Pro,
no matter what kind of cooling you put on it
because A, even though they've both got
four cores and eight threads,
it is a different model of CPU and B,
because the MacBook Air
just doesn't have the power delivery robustness
to keep up with allowing that CPU
to really stretch its legs.
Number two is that the cooling solution on the MacBook Air
is even worse than we thought,
to the point where even just removing
a little bit of material
from the already miniscule heat sink
gave us a 20 plus degree improvement in temperatures
while under sustained load.
Unfortunately, like I said,
we didn't get the performance improvement
that we wanted from that, but that's how she goes.
Just like she goes into her sponsor, Ting.
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Hopefully you guys enjoyed this video,
if you like these kinds of wacky laptop cooling experiments
maybe you'd enjoy our five gigahertz
laptop with blowimatrons hooked up to a shroud
blown through the bottom of it,
it's a gaming notebook, pretty crazy,
it's definitely worth the watch.
Man, I really wanted to post
some crazy performance numbers today
but we just couldn't do it, but it is cool.
- [Brandon] Yeah, it's a 10 degrees right now.
- Get it, it's cool. - Ugh.